View From A Democratic Pollster

One of my readers, a professional pollster for Democrats, e-mails the following, and allows me to quote it with permission. Here is his take on the word “conservative”:

This used to be a huge problem for the left with people feeling distance from the word “liberal”. Say what you like about whether these terms are actually bijective, but the left spent a long time building “progressive” as an alternative to describe a secular, epistemologically rationalist socially democratic politics. For years there was an interesting split in people who would identify as “progressive”, but not “liberal”, and vice versa. Over time the differences were mostly ironed out so you hear people say things like, “You could call me pretty liberal or progressive, I guess.” The same things have now happened to the words “Republican” and “conservative”. They’ve become *poison*, and nobody wants to associate with them.

I’ve always joked that 90% of “libertarians” were “Republicans who want to smoke pot”, 5% were “Republicans too ashamed to admit it” and the rest of them could actually be libertarians. As for “conservative”, well, you guys have been fighting over that one for years, and the end result of it is that whatever it was that the intention was, the polling and focus group tests show that it’s come to mean “authoritarian”, “hypocritical”, “war happy” and all the other things nobody likes. What’s happened is that the word itself is poison, but more importantly, there’s a disjunction, as you’ve directly experienced, between what the main participants in the movement and the rest of the population want that word to mean. I don’t know what your out is, in that there’s so much invested in that very word, “conservative” that I cannot imagine an alternative being feasible, but it seems like that’s the only path.

You’ve lost the war for “conservative”: what’s next?

Here is The Pollster on politics:

Something happened along the way on your side. You guys were once the masters of the universe when it came to understanding issues and how they related to people’s lived daily lives, and their experience thereof. I think that things started to go south in the Clinton years, where superficial successes with things like “Who killed Vince Foster?” and “What’s on the White House Christmas Card List?” led Republicans to think that motivating a state of perpetual outrage was an actual governing strategy. My take on politics has always been that politics is the social practice of collectively determining how society should be ordered – people are looking for not just particular stances on issues that check off items on a list, but a thematic view of the world into which these issues fit as part of a natural whole. This is what made Clinton so effective as a politician, actually. He was able to tap into broad themes by which people think life should be lived, e.g., “Work hard and play by the rules.”, even though he wasn’t able to get much done as President, and what makes Obama so dangerous to your side. We talk about culture shifts frequently, but the thing to recognise is that for many of us, not only does Obama speak to the root ideas in the new culture, but he very much so embodies them. To me, this is what gives him the possibility of truly being our Reagan. Reagan not only spoke to the grievances and aspirations of the American people, but he was able to embody them in a way that made him truly formidable. A small town boy from Illinois who went to a no-name college, but worked hard his whole life and became a massively successful actor, head of a union and then finally entered politics… These things resonate with people.

I spend all day reading response to survey questions from people, and what’s more devastating to the GOP side is that we keep hearing over and over again, even from Republicans, that nobody knows what the GOP are for. What is the vision of twenty-first century life that this party is offering? How will they accommodate the realities of newly developed and developing nations who are able to compete with their former colonial masters? How can a blue collar guy in Southeast Houston hope to make a living that’ll send his kid to college or trade school? What’s does Rand Paul have to say to a suburban housewife who’s desperate for healthcare, but can’t get insured because she’s had breast cancer before? There are no answers.

It is my sense that this fundamental lack of vision of the good life and the path to get us there is the most devastating thing to Republicans and conservatives today. There’s just no possibility of comparing two visions of the world and choosing whose you’d like to see implemented when one side has nothing. What makes Huntsman, I think, utterly devastating as a general election candidate, as Huckabee would have been in 2008, is that they have these complete visions and are able to articulate them. It’s not just charisma – Huntsman’s about as charming to be around as cold crawfish shells from last night’s boil.

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64 Responses to View From A Democratic Pollster

I’ve already made this argument here, so forgive me for belaboring the point.

The problem current conservatives face is one EVERY successful politician and EVERY successful movement eventually faces: once you’ve solved the big problem(s) that people were worried about, the people are freed to worry about different problems, and may like like your opponents’ ideas better.

FDR’s New Deal helped make millions of Americans prosperous… at which point, they could safely vote for Ike.

Ronald Reagan won the Cold War… which meant that people who’d been voting for the GOP because of national security concerns could now base their votes on the social issues or on economic self-interest.

Rudy Giuliani drastically reduced crime in New York City, but in doing so, he eliminated the best issue Republicans had to campaign on, and made it safe for white New Yorkers to vote for liberal Democrats again.

Ronald Reagan was right on the big issues of 1979… but those AREN’T the big issues of 2013, to most people. Taxes AREN’T oppressively high for most of us, and there’s no more Soviet Union. Hence, if your whole platform is based on low taxes and hawkish foreign policy, you’re BOUND to sound irrelevant.

Re: and Paul’s answer to the suburban housewife whose pre-existing condition makes getting health insurance difficult is likely to be more “epistemologically rational” than any progressive defense of the Welfare State as it actually exists.

The most rational answer is to charge everyone the same price for a given policy. That’s how every other product on the market is priced (with very minor exceptions involving things like “Ladies’ Night”, “Senior discounts” and the like). No one thinks the young or the poor are subsidizing the old or the rich because a 25 year old pays the same price for gasoline as a 60 year old. But because differential pricing has been in place for so long for healthcare any attempt to rationalize it and make it work like the rest of the market is treated as an injustice

The most rational answer is to charge everyone the same price for a given policy. That’s how every other product on the market is priced.

A 60-year-old is charged higher prices than a 25-year-old because he costs more to cover. Duh. A policy with the same coverage is simply not the same policy when applied to two people with known differences in existing conditions.

No one thinks the young or the poor are subsidizing the old or the rich because a 25 year old pays the same price for gasoline as a 60 year old.

Because they are getting the exact same product at the exact same cost to the provider. People living in hard-to-reach places pay more for gasoline than people who are closer to oil refineries. If someone suggested that all gas all around the country had to priced the same, you bet it would be seen as a subsidy to those who are in areas where the marker prices gasoline higher.

But because differential pricing has been in place for so long for healthcare any attempt to rationalize it and make it work like the rest of the market is treated as an injustice

No, the reason is that differential pricing exists for an obvious reason, and unless you heavily subsidize insurance or mandate it, no differential pricing means no insurance, as it will not be cost-effective to buy insurance for anyone who is healthy.

Of all the arguments one could use for community rating, yours is the most ridiculous.

Re: A policy with the same coverage is simply not the same policy when applied to two people with known differences in existing conditions.

It ought to be, period. One universal price for one product (with some minor discounting allowed) is a bedrock principle of rational market function. The fact that one person gains more utility from a product is irrelevant. The grocery store does not set its prices based on how hungry individual customers are.

Re: yours is the most ridiculous.

You only call it ridiculous because the current system has been in place so long you can’t imagine any other system. But the current system is deeply irrational and that is the source of much of the dysfunction in healthcare financing. It’s not as if healthcare payers can’t price their product in a universal manner and still be profitable– of course they can, owing to the fact that the Law of Large Numbers allows them to determine their expenses to a good first order approximation (barring catastrophe). And if you are really claiming that universal pricing can’t work in healthcare then what you are saying is the healthcare is a market failure, and shouldn’t be part of the free market– the basis for the argument for a single-payer government system.
You can’t have it both ways.

In regards to charging people for health insurance, I think we all know that it cost more to take care of some people than it does for others. The interesting thing is, in my understanding at least, is the fact that a large reason for people to be insured is that insurance allows you to share the cost of your healthcare, at the price of sharing in the cost of care for others. When you look at it that way, there might be a stronger argument for fixed across the board premiums than we usually assume.

I think the reason we dont have fixed premiums is that most people are willing to pay less at the expense of others paying more, and are willing to want others to take care of those they dont, and are even willing for those others to do so by force of law, but most people do not want to pay more, publically or privately. This isnt neccessarily a bad thing, its just reality, in this case the scarcity of resources, injecting itself into a debate we usually have in exclusively moral and utopian terms.

Perhaps more health care should be pay as you go. This will create problems, but experiencing those problems directly may lead to direct solutions. This is all but evident when one looks at the skyward trends of health care cost. We cant afford the status quo indefinately, not so long as the cost of care wildly outpaces monetary inflation, not that monetary inflation doesnt hamper the possibility of out of pocket care.

If could add one more thing on healthcare, Jon F just made another interesting point, even if I disagree on a few the details in his argument. The point that I think he made was that many of the arguments most commonly made in our nations healthcare debate are essentially arguments for single payer, even when they are presented as tweaks to the status quo.

I was just watching the (very good) movie Red Dragon, mainly as contrast to the superior Manhunter, and during the ending Hopkins’ Hannibal critiques our society as being cursed by half measures, embracing not savegry nor wisdom. This observation, while belonging to a fictional
monster, seemed poignant given our problems with health care.

Both single payer and free market health care systems offer potential benefits whilst suffering from percieved drawbacks. Either way, society could really get something worthwhile out of fully embracing one system, rather than suffering from the worst of both worlds (without the best of either). Either way, some pundits might be right and the others wrong, and by choosing one system we might prove or disprove that systems feasability (for us, at least).

A 60-year-old is charged higher prices than a 25-year-old because he costs more to cover. Duh.

A 25 year old wants to purchase a policy that covers him for the entire duration of his life. As does the 60 year old.

That said, a sick 25 year old will cost more to ensure than a healthy 25 year old. In fact, youcould argue that what happens is that the healthy 25 year olds are being robbed for the benefit of the sick 25 year olds. But then, that’s the entire point of insurance.

But, hey I accept that conservatives belief that some people with pre-existing conditions nee dto die for the cause of FREEEEEDOM! But you can’t sell that to the public, so you have to impose it by force.

Sometimes I wonder if you are simply a troll, given how many of your arguments run on (deliberate?) misinterpretation.

On average, health insurance costs more to provide to a 60-year-old than it does to a 25-year-old. A policy with the same coverage will, on average, not wind up providing the same things to the 60-year-old as to the 25-year-old, because their medical needs are different.

So in a very real sense, it isn’t the same policy, even if on paper it appears the same.

It ought to be, period.

So you are saying that the 25-year-old should get exactly the same treatments as the 60-year-old, whether that means he gets treatments he doesn’t need or the 60-year-old forgoes treatments he does need? If that is not what you are saying, then you are not responding to the point I was actually making.

It ought to be, period. One universal price for one product (with some minor discounting allowed) is a bedrock principle of rational market function.

No it isn’t. Airline tickets, used cars, anything bought at a flea market. Universal pricing occurs when it is not cost effective to use differential pricing, but with big-ticket items, people often get priced individually depending on the economics of the particular circumstance.

The fact that one person gains more utility from a product is irrelevant. The grocery store does not set its prices based on how hungry individual customers are.

It would if hungry customers cost the store more to serve.

No one thinks the young or the poor are subsidizing the old or the rich because a 25 year old pays the same price for gasoline as a 60 year old.

If gas stations charged by the fill-up instead of by the gallon, then people would think that small-tank cars were subsidizing large-tank ones.

It’s not as if healthcare payers can’t price their product in a universal manner and still be profitable– of course they can, owing to the fact that the Law of Large Numbers allows them to determine their expenses to a good first order approximation (barring catastrophe).

Do you actually think that anyone is arguing that insurance companies are unable to calculate what premium they would need to charge all of their customers to meet expenses? Thank you for knocking down another straw man. The argument is that community-rated insurance would be too expensive for someone who is likely not going to use it. If I have a 1-in-10 chance of undergoing an operation that costs $100,000, I might be willing to pay $12,000 (over the course of my lifetime) in return for knowing that I will be covered if I am the unlucky guy. If the chance is 1-in-1000, I might be willing to pay $120 or even $250. But I am unlikely to pay $12,000 in that case.

In regards to charging people for health insurance, I think we all know that it cost more to take care of some people than it does for others. The interesting thing is, in my understanding at least, is the fact that a large reason for people to be insured is that insurance allows you to share the cost of your healthcare, at the price of sharing in the cost of care for others. When you look at it that way, there might be a stronger argument for fixed across the board premiums than we usually assume.

Insurance is about protecting against unknown risks. Known risks are priced into the system.

That said, a sick 25 year old will cost more to insure than a healthy 25 year old. In fact, you could argue that what happens is that the healthy 25 year olds are being robbed for the benefit of the sick 25 year olds.

Not if they willingly paid into the system – which they do because they do not know ahead of time who is healthy and who is sick.

But then, that’s the entire point of insurance.

People buy insurance willingly because they do know the risks, but not who will actually experience them. The whole point of insurance is that I pay for my risk ahead of time instead of taking a chance that I will have a catastrophically expensive treatment.

Insurance is not about spreading out the cost, it is about spreading out the risk. People pay based on their risk levels.

Healthcare financing should just be done straight-out as healthcare funding without the pretense of being “insurance”. Unlike, say, homeowners insurance, there is no chance you will go through life without making any claims. The probability of having health claims is pretty much 100% for all of us.

Re: On average, health insurance costs more to provide to a 60-year-old than it does to a 25-year-old.

You neglect the simple fact that age is not a permanent fact about a person, unlike race or gender. (Why, oh why, are human beings so blind to Time? I can tolerate just about every human folly you folks except the way you see the present as your only reality) No one stays the same age. Today’s 25 year old is tomorrow’s 60 year old, and as noted above the likelihood he or she will run up big healthcare bills is 100%, or almost so since a negligible fraction of people do die of sudden trauma. Everyone, with only trivial exception, will be using their community-rated insurance sooner or later.

I really do not know why you should be so wrought up over this. I’m willing to bet you are not a 25 year old, and even if you are, see above: you will be older and sicker some day, and it’s safe to assume you are not eager to die of sudden trauma while still young. The system I and others are suggesting really does work in your favor, not to your detriment.

Because you used a dumb argument. Notice that I said “of all the arguments one could use for community rating, yours is the most ridiculous.” I did not mean to imply that there were no good arguments, just that you were using one that (a) was not good, and (b) was particularly bad.

Healthcare financing should just be done straight-out as healthcare funding without the pretense of being “insurance”.

You can make that argument, but it is completely different than the argument you used originally.

But because differential pricing has been in place for so long for healthcare any attempt to rationalize it and make it work like the rest of the market is treated as an injustice.

My point was that health insurance works just like the rest of the insurance market. You can argue that it should not work this way, but pretending that it is a major exception to the way the market normally operates is ridiculous.

Your original argument was that everyone was buying the same product, and so should be charged the same. You also said: “No one thinks the young or the poor are subsidizing the old or the rich because a 25 year old pays the same price for gasoline as a 60 year old.” Given the difference between insurance and gasoline, this was a bad comparison.

And if you are really claiming that universal pricing can’t work in healthcare then what you are saying is the healthcare is a market failure, and shouldn’t be part of the free market– the basis for the argument for a single-payer government system.

The fact that universal pricing cannot work does not make health insurance a market failure. Maybe it is a market failure, but if so, it is not because universal pricing cannot work – unless you view all non-community rated insurance as market failures.

You neglect the simple fact that age is not a permanent fact about a person, unlike race or gender.

I was assuming that your point was about differential charges in general, not just about the specific case of age.

Bottom line: I am not saying that no case can be made for community rating of health insurance (although doing so requires either mandating insurance or subsidizing it to the degree that out-of-pocket premiums are the equivalent (or less) than those that would be paid by the healthiest insured people). I am saying that the particular argument you used was full of false comparisons, misinterpretations, and fallacies.

The GOP’s problems today mirror the problem the Democrats had in the first term of George W. Bush’s presidency.

At that time, it seemed that the Democrats could not unite. The people at the top (the DLC, etc.) had a vision of where they wanted the country to go. But they did not seem to be able to unite the little constituencies into a single, solid grassroots base.

It was hard to imagine, for instance, how big labor and environmentalism could fit together, let alone trying to add immigration amnesty on top of both.

Since the 1970’s, all of the Democrat leadership wanted to focus on women’s “reproductive health” (an ominous euphemism). However, they were legitimately concerned that such a platform would alienate socially-conservative blue-collar voters. Thus, the hand-wringing over the “matter with Kansas.”

They wanted to downsize the military, but those plans seemed utterly dashed by the security paranoia unleashed by 9/11.

Probably their greatest weakness was that they all came across as lilly-white Ivy League know-it-alls, the kind of folks who had no real idea what the lives of the “little people” they claimed to be fighting for. They seemed more at home at law school reunions than church barbecues.

For all his faults, George W. Bush successfully brought big government social conservatives (basically, Truman Democrats), war hawks, free-market de-regulators, and tax protesters into a “big tent.” But his presidency was not, in any meaningful sense, “conservative.” Indeed, the Bush coalition relied on a mutant conjoining of old-fashioned “Dixie” Democrats with Wall Street speculators. It left traditional Republicans wondering what had happened to their party.

It was Patrick J. Buchanan who realized early on that this was a bread-and-circuses imperial presidency. Bush’s coalition had been engineered by pollsters and the slick PR guys who tapped into the then-new media of Fox News and political talk radio. Its chief architects were people who would have been viewed with suspicion by Republicans of an earlier generation.

Even today, for most people, the word “Republican” has connotations that those of us who grew up in the atmosphere of the old Grand Old Party can’t quite understand.

Unfortunately, the words “Republican,” “conservative,” and “GOP” have been re-branded in the image of George W. Bush. I look at Ohio’s current governor John Kasich, for example, and see someone who has no trace of Robert Taft, or even George Voinovich. He may be a Republican governor in a traditionally Republican state, but his policies do not quite fit Ohio’s more modest Republican tradition so much as they fit the Fox News / National Review formula. Surely, the glitter is wearing off the faux-Republican party.

Now the real conservatives have all scattered. Anti-imperialists like Christopher Buckley became Obamacons, or else tried to build a new party concept around the Dr. Paul. Pro-lifers have come to understand that big government conservatism opened the door to Obamacare. (No one has had their hats handed to them quite like the Catholic bishops who had tried to walk both side of the big-government fence).

The current party leadership remains in love with the tired ideas of the Bush faux-alition. It will take the next generation to rethink “conservative” in a way that broadens the brand… and maybe dignifies it with rich tradition one recognizes in the vision of, say, Russell Kirk. Until then, we will remain a scattered, tribal party. . . kind of like where the Democrats were ten years ago.

Interesting that the comments seemed to have devolved to a discussion or primarily Health Care. So that’s the vision of the “good life” that liberals concentrate on?

I find the Dem pollster in question to be just about as “blind” as many Republican pollsters. Let’s not forget that these people are deep Washington insiders. Their whole view of the world is constrained by the arguments going on amongst lobbyists, bureaucrats, congressional aides and white house flappers. The very questions this pollster asks are not the questions I hear from my neighbors. His questions are all biased toward a left wing outlook…they all contain the root of “what is the government going to do for me?” Who is going to make me safe in an unsafe world. (in this question resides the effect of removing God from the equation),

This is not to say that Republicans or conservatives are not struggling with growing pains of living in the 21st century. However they will figure that out and much of the infighting, while horrible to look at, seems to be the normal way of making the sausage. I believe even your pollster has an understanding of how the pendulum swings back and forth for the political parties. (witness those 12 “long” years of Republican dominance in the 80’s).

On note that strikes me is that for all his posturing about the forward looking nature of liberals/progressive/democrats — isn’t the current administration’s approach to most problems the one tried already by the American progressives (Wilson, et al) in the early 20th century then again by FDR in the 30’s? And in Europe post WWII and in extreme form in USSR, China, Cuba? As Dr. Phil says:
How’s that working out for you?

Perhaps the collectivist ways solve some safety problems but are the people there really happier? Rod, in your trip to Paris, it seems you found the food and the cultural activities amazing, but did you find the average French person more happy than an American or Louisianan? More fulfilled, More content, More connected to the meaning of Life?

And my final question to that Dem pollster: what happens when the progressives run out of other people’s money?

I find for myself that the difference between a conservative and a Republican is that with mutual effort and assumptions of good faith, I can find enough common language to have a conversation of ideas with a conservative that may be difficult but is typically rewarding, even if neither of us convinces the other of anything. With a Republican, I generally find that we can’t even come to common definitions of facts in order to set the terms of a potential conversation.

I am reminded of the idea that when it comes to compromise, both parties should strive to find the 80% or so that you can mutually agree on, and work on that first. I feel like I can define the metaphorical 80% when I am having a conversation with a conservative.